For a a plain non-techie end user in the market for a new hosting company, you may have come upon the server location feature, and might be having a bit of trouble wrapping your head around how does server location impact your website hosting service.

When you look at different website hosts you may have a a choice of multiple locations. You might be wondering how they maintain these servers if they’re so far away? What if there’s a power outage, flood, or fire – do they contract with local companies?

Also how it impacts load speed and reliability. Should you go with servers that are close? Does it really matter where the servers are located?

Distance of your server does not impact the speed, because the major Internet highways have enough bandwidth and routers are fast enough to deliver website content with unnoticeable delays from the other part of the world compared to local servers. The only relevant factor remaining is the network the host belongs to and the network the surfer belongs to.

“Closer may not be better”, it is not close by distance, but close by hops – the number of routers and exchanges between visitor and website host. The actual global “real” distance does not matter much. A website located in the same town will normally load much slower when surfer and website host are on different provider backbones than a website on the other side of the globe when both are on the same broadband network.

But there are other reasons you may consider when deciding the location:

Legal obligations of the Data Center for the country it is in. For example Data Center can not stop government officials to access the data if it is located in USA but it is not easy to access this data if the servers are located in Canada. So they can not spy on your data as easy as they would if it was in a US based Data Center.

You may also want to consider a specific location for your Google ranking. Google ranks websites based on their IP address. For example, when someone searches for a website in Canada, Google ranks the websites located in Canada higher. Because simply it would be more relevant to the person searching and Google is all about returning the best results for the user. It would only make sense Google lists the sites nearby than the ones located in other countries.If you prefer web site visitors from a certain country, you should choose a data center located physically in that country.

Most companies outsource their data centers. So they must be maintaining the one in their country and leasing servers in a data center located abroad. Physical server maintenance are done by the employees of the data center at that location. Most of the software can be installed and updated remotely. Servers can be rebooted remotely and debugged remotely. If there’s a power outage, flood, or fire – the remote data center operation is responsible for preventing all these interruptions and possibilities. If your provider is a reputable provider at its own address Country, they should have chosen the right partners for overseas operations as well.